The Beast!

Not really news, but I finally got a new truck. I love it. I got a very good deal with the lowest interest rate avail because I apparrently am an11 on a scale of 1-10 for my credit score. They gave me a really great trade in on my Ranger, I looked it up on kellybluebook.com and it was right where it should have been. And they gave me a couple of rebates, so I have a very manageable monthly payment. I got a Ford F-150 Crew Cab Lariat Edition 4x4. It is the Lariat edition which is the top end version of the F-150 series. It is pretty much loaded with leather, chrome everything, moon roof, in dash 6 disc cd and mp3 stereo (sub woofer under the back seats is nice too!), and has power everything. The inside is sweet with a 3 tone dash, silver, mahogany, and tan leather. It has lots of room for passengers, which is a huge improvement over the Ranger. Its got a 5.4 Liter Triton V-8 so it definitely has the power, but on the downside guzzles the gas! It drives smooth as hell, especially compared to my old truck. And most of all I think it looks damn nice!


I've been wanting/needing a new vehicle 4 a while, for several reasons, and wanted to stick with a truck so that in the event that I need to haul something, I won't have to borrow one.

1. 4 Wheel drive. Considering the fact that I live in Portland now, and Peyton is on the coast, I am going to need to have a 4x4 to deal with highway 26 in the winter.

2. More than 2 seats The Ranger's little sideways fold up back seats were great and all, but if I had Peyton and her car seat in the truck, everyone else was out of luck.

3. Size. Let me tell you, size does matter! If I get in a wreck, this truck will fare much better than Tinkerbell (this is what my friend Steve called my Ranger).

4. Safety, and this was the biggest reason. 2 weeks ago, my Meat Manager's 11 year old son was killed in a head on car crash on Highway 26 past Sandy. He was sitting in the front seat of the vehicle, wearing a seat belt, and had an air bag, but it wasn't enough to save his life. If something happened to Peyton, I don't think I would be able to go on, and with the old truck she was in the front seat no matter what. With the full size truck she can finally be in the back seat where I feel much better about her safety.

5. Because I wanted it! I have had the ranger for 5 years now, and it never really felt like me. I am a pretty big sized guy, and it just felt cramped. That is definitely not the case anymore, where I have to use the running boards to get in and out of the F-150.

It is Official

Well, as of yesterday, I am transferring to a new store. I asked to be moved in order to get myself promoted, and to be closer to Jill in Lake Oswego. The commuting which is what I have been doing for the last couple months is terrible, especially with the current cost of gas. Anyway I start at my new store, which is in the St. Johns area, about a block from the bridge, on Sunday the 13th. The store is the exact same size and footprint as the store in Astoria but I think it is about a year newer. My last day in Astoria will be Thursday May 10th. I have an apartment that I am sharing with someone, at the edge of Portland near the Bridgeport mall. I am very excited and nervous at the same time, it is a big change, but it feels like a much needed one. My plan is to get myself promoted and hopefully have my own store before the end of the year. Now if I could just get rid of my apartment in Astoria, I'd be set!

So Much, So little time

Well Colin is right the world is ending. Why else would I have forotten to post about the new NIN album? It is amazing and here is a clip with Trent talking about it.

The New Someone

1st Video from new album

Here s Survivalism from the upcoming Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero. It was found on several USB drives after a concert in Europe.

Good News For JB

Rage Against The Machine are going to reunite for a concert in April. It's a one time thing though. But with Cornell restarting his solo career, you never know.

THE BIG 30!

Well, another one bites the dust...Happy B-Day Jerky! Trust me I feel your pain, just drink til you black out, always works for me!

From Old to New

Well it was time to upgrade. I have had my computer for over 3 years and things just weren't moving like they should, even after numerous reformats, so I took the plunge and decided to build a new one.


Old System:
Processor: 2Ghz AMD Athlon 64 3200
Operating System: Win XP Pro
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Video Card: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
Sound Card: Turtle Beach Santa Cruz 5.1
Hard Drives: 5 totaling 1090 GB
Monitor: 19 inch LCD 4:3 aspect ratio
Optical Drive: 1 DVD Rom & 1 16x DVD+-R/RW/R DL writer
Case: Antec Grey aluminum Midsize Tower
External Bays: 4 5.25"/2 3.5"
Internal Bays: 4 3.5"
Power supply: Antec 430watt
Fans: Seven (1-3" internal and 1-3" external power supply fans, 2-3" external front, 1-3" external side, & 2-3" external rear fans)




New System:
Processor: 1.86 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo 6300
Operating System: Win XP Pro Media Center edition
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Video Card: Nvidia Geforce 7600 LE & Conexant Falcon Video Capture Card w/remote
Sound Card: Realtek High Definition 7.1 on board audio
Hard Drives: 5 totaling 1290 GB
Monitor: 22 inch LCD 16:9 aspect ratio
Optical Drive: 1 DVD Rom & 1 Litescribe (makes a label on top) 18x DVD+-R/RW/R DL writer
Case: Antec silver composite Midsize Tower
External Bays: 4 5.25"/1 3.5"
Internal Bays: 6 3.5"
Power supply: Antec 500 watt
Fans: Five (1-3" internal and 1-3" temp sensing external power supply fans, 1-3" external front, 1-5" rear external, & 1-5" external top fan)

The new case is beautiful, it is a silvery color, that kind of changes colors slightly at different angles. The case is lighter than the old one but about the same size, This one has a spoiler on top that covers the very quiet top case fan which compared to the old computer that sounded like a jet taking off, is extremely quite, almost shockingly quiet. I also can't believe how much cooler it is even with fewer fans and twice the processor, no more heating the office with it. I put XP Media Center on it, which is pretty neat with the remote. It is very similar to what Colin had with his old gateway, only I can also run it wirelessly through my xbox 360 to my TV and do pretty much anything (surf, stream dvds on my pc hard drive or any other video files, pictures, music etc) or I can watch it on the monitor as well as watch TV through the capture card on the PC. The monitor is freakin huge, wide screen which is infinitely better than the regular 4:3. I upgraded my keyboard to a wireless which is nice and kept the wireless logitech mouse I already had. I brought over all but one of the 5 HDDs but added a new 320gb to replace a 120gb.

I am thinking about going raid 0 with the hard drives, but don't know enough about it so I will have to read up first. The dvd burner makes labels on the discs which is kind of cool. And so far the system is much faster to process stuff, especially in photoshop and other intensive programs. I was reading you can over clock the Core 2 Duo that I have to the same speed as the top end processor at 3.0 Ghz for about $700 cheaper and it is still pretty stable so I will probably be doing that. All in all I am pretty pleased, and it was pretty reasonable, $1400 not counting the 4 hard drives and the mouse I already had.

I set up Rachelle with my old pc to replace the old 1Ghz Pentium III Dell that I have had for like 8 or nine years which I then set up for Peyton. Peyton absolutely loves having her own "puter" that she uses to play her Barbie and her pet shop game, as well as surf her sites (Noggin, Playhouse Disney, & Nick Jr.) And now she doesn't have to compete for time on Rachelle's computer. She is getting scary good with it. Doesn't need our help really much at all anymore. The way she is going she will be building me my next computer!